The Checquy’s implant-screening program was an emergency response to the discovery that Grafters had infiltrated the organization and modified agents’ bodies. Designed by Security Chief Clovis, it extended from the Court to the wider Checquy Group and made the search for physical evidence inseparable from the fear that the people conducting the search might themselves be compromised.

Causes and Scope

The immediate trigger was the exposure of the Grafters’ presence inside the Checquy. At the reception, the traitors who were identified had Grafter implants, giving Clovis a concrete starting point for finding further infiltrators. He cautioned, however, that not every Grafter agent necessarily carried such implants: screening could identify a known kind of evidence without proving that everyone who passed the tests was trustworthy.

The scale of the response reflected how far suspicion had spread. Clovis planned to screen every member of the organization, beginning with the Court the following day. The examinations would be conducted in-house, and the medical staff would be heavily occupied for months. The scope made the program more than a check on the handful of attackers already discovered; it was a prolonged institutional investigation into possible internal penetration.

Safeguards and Procedure

Clovis’s protocol tried to make the screening process resistant to manipulation. Because the doctors themselves had not yet been cleared, randomly selected groups of three observers would be present in examination rooms to watch for tampering. Each result also required agreement from every Checquy doctor and a randomly selected civilian medical practitioner. Results would be sent to thirty-five doctors around the world. Clovis considered it unlikely that every Checquy doctor was a Grafter mole, but the civilian practitioner provided another check even in that worst-case possibility.

The procedures imposed on Myfanwy show what the organization-wide plan meant in practice. Ingrid explained that Myfanwy’s soap and shampoo had been removed so that her scent could be compared with preserved ampoules of her sweat. Security Chief Clovis had also randomly reassigned appointments, reasoning that random scheduling would make it harder for Grafters to evade detection. The measure overrode Myfanwy’s request for an afternoon appointment and brought the screening forward.

The examination was a battery rather than a single test: blood, urine, sputum, stool, and hair samples; fingerprinting; eye and ear examinations; a DNA scrape; an MRI; and a further procedure the technicians called the swarm of bees. The plan also included having dogs sniff the people being screened and using specialized personnel to perform another test. The sequence conveyed the breadth of Clovis’s attempt to search for traces across multiple kinds of evidence, while its duration and intrusiveness made the process a substantial burden on those examined.

Myfanwy’s Screening and Its Limits

Myfanwy underwent the tests under guard. As she and Ingrid walked through the Rookery, two large bodyguards followed them; partway through the examinations, Myfanwy realized they were not only there to protect her. They were also positioned to secure or kill her if she proved to be a Grafter plant. The screening therefore treated her not simply as the person being tested but as a possible threat whose status could determine how the guards acted.

The search extended beyond physical examinations. Ingrid arranged for the Court members’ non-personal diaries to be analyzed, but this line of inquiry did not produce the Belgian connection they were looking for. Myfanwy’s questions about how many tests remained elicited a list that included the samples, identification checks, imaging, the swarm of bees, the dogs, and the final specialized test. The investigation thus combined bodily examination with the review of records, without producing an immediate answer to every question surrounding the infiltration.

The dog test illustrated the difficulty of interpreting any one method. Myfanwy noted that dogs had not reacted when Shantay’s people brought in a Grafter, so their silence could not reliably clear a suspect. Ingrid replied that Clovis still thought the dogs worth using because they had detected Van Syoc. The program proceeded by accumulating imperfect methods rather than relying on a test that could settle the matter on its own.

Institutional Distrust and Significance

The screening began in an atmosphere where loyalty had already become difficult to judge. Ingrid recalled Richard Whitlam, a longtime aide to Bishop Alrich who had been kind to new Retainers and had given her a cactus on her first day. At the reception, he had tried to attack the Bishop with a bone stiletto. His apparently steadfast service and personal kindness had not prevented him from being implicated as a Grafter. Ingrid feared that, if someone so trusted could be an infiltrator, the Grafters might already know the Checquy’s secrets and need only insiders to open the way for the rest of their forces.

That anxiety gives the screening its central contradiction: the Checquy needed its own personnel to inspect one another, but could not assume that the personnel doing the inspecting were beyond suspicion. Random observers, civilian review, and checks on the doctors were safeguards against this problem, not proof that it had been solved. The program’s extensive procedures were therefore both a practical response to the implants found at the reception and a record of how deeply the discovery had unsettled confidence within the organization.